Budding Edison High filmmakers' empathetic look at bullies takes first place at student festival

Sunday

May 26, 2013 at 12:01 AMMay 26, 2013 at 8:02 AM

STOCKTON - With his deep voice and serious manner, Brendan Adams sounded every bit the Hollywood mogul as he spoke the other day of his film-making philosophy.

Roger Phillips

STOCKTON - With his deep voice and serious manner, Brendan Adams sounded every bit the Hollywood mogul as he spoke the other day of his film-making philosophy.

"It's not just putting a bunch of clips and music, it's telling a story to your audience," Adams said. "I like a little bit of a darker tone and then the realism, and when I tell the story to the audience, I want them to relate to whatever character I'm portraying on the screen."

Adams isnot yet a member of the Hollywood A-list. It's possible, though, that he is on his way.

Together with fellow Edison High School sophomore Jordan Mitchell, the two 16-year-olds recently won first place at the Reel Life Film Festival, a student competition in Modesto hosted by the Stanislaus County Office of Education.

Using images and Mitchell's music - but no dialogue - their 150-second film tells a tale of bullying through the eyes of the perpetrator. But "Lost," which can be viewed on YouTube (search: 6KingsEntertainment), seeks not to demonize the bully but to understand the forces at play in her life.

Adams and Mitchell had to keep their film within the festival's three-minute limit and had to address the theme "Choose Civility."

"(Film) needs to make people think," Mitchell said. "If you can make the audience think, you can actually make a change in the reality that we live in."

Adams (an admirer of director Christopher Nolan) and Mitchell (a Quentin Tarantino fan) have big dreams. Already, they are planning next year's movie, a longer film they say will be a "science fiction drama" and will include dialogue. By their senior year, they hope to enter a movie in the Sundance Film Festival. Mitchell already has researched the process of getting a parental rating for their film.

Edison's after-school program, operated by the YMCA, has provided much of the support for the efforts of Adams, Mitchell and the students who assisted in producing "Lost." It's a symbiotic relationship, said the program's director, Isela Robles, with staff helping students make their ideas a reality.

"Once they present things to us, we help them achieve different goals," Robles said.

An added benefit for Edison is that Adams and Mitchell share their know-how in filmmaking and music with other students at the high school. Whitney Ramirez, a professional photographer and YMCA staffer who works closely with Adams and Mitchell, said she hopes that when the two prodigies graduate in 2015 they will leave behind a younger generation of budding auteurs.

"They're really the ones who have taken the lead," Ramirez said of Adams and Mitchell. "We're giving them the platform to perform, and then when the students take it and they run with it ... I couldn't have dreamed this up, but they did and that's the beautiful part of it."